Product Updates

Live and on-demand video content can be a compelling medium. It can build excitement for product launches, engage employees with corporate communication or educate viewers around specific topics. Managing and updating a company’s video activities can therefore be crucial.

For those leveraging IBM’s video streaming solutions, an on-demand and live video manager dashboard is provided. Accessed online, this allows administrators and managers to quickly go live, edit video assets or control individual access levels.

This interface has been updated at IBM, streamlining management functions while also enhancing the ability to find and locate content channels available.

• Header: go live and change accounts
• Dashboard navigation
• Channel selector

IBM Watson Media, an IBM Business would like to announce new enhancements to the IBM Video Streaming service, including to the registration gate feature available through the IBM Video Streaming service, which will allow for users to have more privacy controls.

These include providing the link to a privacy policy along with a feature for users to opt out of the sale of their data when they provide personal information on the video registration gate.

Note: currently the opt-out feature is only available for viewers located in California, USA.

The use of video inside enterprises is on the rise. This rise is in proportion with the amount of content being created for corporate communications. As companies increasingly embrace video for internal communications, video assets are used more. In fact, at organizations that use video for online events more than 100 times annually 49% of their employees watch online video for business on a daily basis.

This presents an opportunity to engage employees at scale while at the same time breaking down geographic barriers that might have existed in the past in doing so. It also, however, presents a challenge in curating and maintaining this growing volume of content. While AI aspects have been introduced, automating both closed caption generation and fueling content discovery in place of manual metadata, there is still manual work to be done.

To address this, IBM Watson Media has introduced bulk features for account administrators and managers to take advantage of. This includes the ability to bulk video publish and label on-demand video content that has been added to an account among other bulk features.

• Bulk video publish and unpublish
• Add labels in bulk
• Copy videos in bulk
• Delete videos in bulk

Looking for a method to allow your viewers to slow down or speed up a video? IBM Watson Media is introducing a way for end users to control the playback speed of on-demand videos. This enables viewers to slow down the material, to savor moments or better comprehend segments, or speed up the material, for those looking to breeze through the video.

Read on to understand how users have access to this feature and what it allows them to do for on-demand content.

• Player speed control
• Responsive and mobile compatible
• Speed up video with closed captions
• Keyboard accessible

Need an accessible HTML5 video player? A player built with compliance in mind to broaden those who can watch video content?

IBM Watson Media has been making improvements to the existing video player around accessibility. This included re-evaluating keyboard controls, visual accessibility like font and indicators, along with many other aspects toward accessibility. As a result, the player now meets the IBM accessibility guidelines, as of version 7.0, along with the W3C WCAG 2.0 standards and Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act: Application and Scoping Requirements. This article covers the various advancements and features found in the player toward making it accessible. Note that while it touches on captions, it won’t go into great depth. For more information on that topic, watch this webinar on How to Add Closed Captions Powered by IBM Watson.

• Keyboard accessible
• Screen reader support
• Visual accessibility
• Closed captions
• Disabled auto play
• HTML5 and browser accessibility

IBM Watson Media has updated the player available through the IBM video streaming solutions. This includes enhancements to the UI and improved consistencies in the experience across devices. It also encompasses the removal of Flash as a fallback option.

Some of these features, while not technically new, haven’t been widely available. The best example are the stats for the stream, which can show details like the CDN being used. This helps convey the normally behind the scenes power of the multi-CDN technology that IBM’s video streaming services utilize, which is detailed in this Scaling Video Delivery to Reach Massive Audiences white paper.

• UI changes
• Responsive design
• Stats interface
• Added play/pause interactions
• Enhanced support for Android devices
• Removing Flash

Looking for security consideration strategies related to enterprise video delivery? Curious at how to approach user roles inside an organization around managing video delivery?

Technology exists that can effectively scale video delivery from a global perspective through CDNs. In addition, solutions exist that can be deployed on location to reduce the network footprint of video content, mitigating strain that might be placed on the WAN (wide area network) from consumption. However, this technology, which includes monitoring and other capabilities, requires some form of management. With security being paramount for internal video content and maintaining network integrating, a question arises from how to approach access for this.

This article will cover a few best practices for managing security across an enterprise video delivery infrastructure. It also details some of the recent updates to the IBM ECDN (Enterprise Content Delivery Network) solution. This includes important updates to how users interface with the portal, in particular the addition of user roles.

• What is ECDN?
• Portal and network monitoring
• User roles and managing access

Interested in learning how to live stream in multiple languages? Offering multi-lingual content as part of your video strategy can be a great way to broaden attendance and improve asset comprehension. It can also allow more people to share in the excitement of live video, enjoying in-the-moment experiences while being able to appreciate the details.

IBM Watson Media has added the ability to broadcast live content in multiple languages. This allows broadcasters to publish a video stream and then include multiple audio streams as part of the same live broadcast. Consequently, being able to effectively produce content for more people in more places. This also fits into one of the video trends of 2018, which saw a notable increase in the global viewership of content.

• Benefits of multi-lingual video content
• Creating a good multi-language experience
• Promoting multi-lingual video assets
• Doing a multi-language broadcast
• Setting a default language
• User experience
• Support for multiple language captions

Looking for a streaming video analytics API and other developer tools related to video metrics?

IBM has expanded the analytics options available to IBM video streaming and enterprise video streaming users. This includes a set of APIs that allows developers to take metrics related to their video content and infuse them into other applications. These available analytics can be used to track content broadly, seeing metrics on all content. However, they can also be used to track individual usage, associated with an email address gathered either after a user authenticates for restricted internal content or fills out a registration gate for video marketing content.

This article covers what type of data you can get through using the streaming video analytics API, where to find them and API use cases. Some of these are focused on the idea that they will be used for video marketing, while others on the very different use case of internal comms. For the latter, also be sure to download our Using Video for Internal Corporate Communications, Training & Compliance white paper as well.

• Building a streaming video analytics dashboard
• Viewer: individual viewer tracking
• View: session data
• Using the APIs
• Analytics API use cases

Looking for cloud video editing capabilities? Tools that can let you trim content online while also looking into value adds like the ability to chapter content for better accessibility?

IBM Watson Media offers capabilities for content owners to modify videos, either uploaded or archived from previous live sessions, online. This is non-destructive, meaning changes can be reverted, and is collaborative as multiple managers and admins can utilize the same account to edit video content.

This article covers this feature set along with highlighting improvements that have been made, moving the technology to being HTML5 based. Also be sure to register for our Getting Started with Enterprise Video Management webinar as well, which will cover this and any additional improvements and features to the IBM Watson Media services.

• Cloud video editing
• Online video trimming use cases
• Creating video chapters
• HTML5 based and other improvements